MARLOW | A marketplace for dissemination of lowpower micro-electronic design

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ESD-LPD

European Low Power Initiative
for Electronic System Design

Low power design became crucial with the wide spread of portable information and communication terminals, where a small battery has to last for a long period. High performance electronics, in addition, suffers from a permanent increase of the dissipated power per square millimeter of silicon, due to the increasing clock-rates, which causes cooling and reliability problems or otherwise limits the performance.
The European Union's Information Technologies Programme 'Esprit' did therefore launch' a 'Pilot action for Low Power Design', which eventually grew to 19 R&D projects and one coordination project, with an overall budget of 14 million EURO. It is meanwhile known as European Low Power Initiative for Electronic System Design (ESD-LPD) and will be completed in the year 2002. It involves to develop or demonstrate new design methods for power reduction, while the coordination project takes care that the methods, experiences and results are properly documented and publicised.

The initiative addresses low power design at various levels. This includes system and algorithmic level, instruction set processor level, custom processor level, RT-level, gate level, circuit level and layout level. It covers data dominated and control dominated as well as asynchronous architectures. 10 projects deal mainly with digital, 7 with analog and mixed-signal, and 2 with software related aspects. The principal application areas are communication, medical equipment and e-commerce devices.

Except for the ESD-LPD low power design cluster, another cluster was started in the area of Mixed-Signal Design.